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About Me

Just a small portion of the music decorating the family room of our home. The wife says it's not so easy to use vinyl as accessories.

Many years ago, when I was single, I was asked if I lived alone. “No,” I said. “I live with my albums.”

I had everything I needed then — a job, a studio apartment overlooking a basketball court, a bed, a black and white TV, a stereo, a collection of Cheever’s short stories, hundreds of albums stuffed into old milk cartons or cardboard boxes on the floor, and just enough space to move around. If ever I needed more space, the bed would have been sent packing.

I’ve since moved into less-bohemian digs and bought a house, married well and fathered a son, switched jobs a few times and moved almost 1,000 miles from home. The albums followed every time. The milk cartons and boxes have given way to wall units, which hold more than 2,000 albums. Exactly how many I don’t know. I counted them once, but the count is old and there are too many to re-count. What would be the point of it anyway? (Every 5 years or so, I find an album in the clutter, bought 20-30 years ago, still unopened and never listened to. It’s like finding money that’s gone through the washer and dryer, but is still usable.)

On my birthday last September, I linked on Facebook to Coltrane’s My Favorite Things on YouTube, because it’s one of my favorite songs. It said something about the day. The next day I linked to something else and the next day to still something else. And then I started writing short blurbs about the artists instead of about me, and along the way I received a little encouragement and positive feedback . . . and here we are.

But it really started more than three decades ago, when two of my co-workers taught me there was more to music than the FM dial on a radio. I had never heard of the ECM record label or Keith Jarrett or Eberhard Weber or Egberto Gismonti or a thousand other artists you’ll never hear if you listen for a millennium to commercial radio. I owe my old co-workers thanks, wherever they are today, for introducing me to the possibilities.

They probably still have more albums (even if they’re on discs and/or better organized) and certainly more knowledge than I. But now I have a little of the latter, a great curiosity for more and, as colleague Ken Willis would say, a crack research department headed by Dr. Google. And more than enough vanity to think my passion is worth sharing.

Companies no longer make albums in bulk, and mine now have an extended (and growing) family of more than 1,000 CDs. I’m thankful there’s satellite radio and YouTube and Pandora and an app for my favorite radio station, Philadelphia’s WXPN, that I listen to foremost when I walk the dog late at night and Echoes with John Diliberto is on. I’m thankful there’s the sound of music in our own house when our son plays one of his four instruments. I’m thankful my wife designed and encouraged this site (and my baseball site), even if she’s not crazy about the music or the albums (although we do share a love of all things Louis Jordan).

But every now and then I look around and wonder where all the milk cartons have gone.

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Featured Posts

My better half is gone for three days, and who can blame her: the wind from outside is louder than the clarinet from the digital device inside. But this means that she can’t critique what’s on the CD player from 1,000 miles away, and that Don Byron’s Tuskegee Experiments, which met with less than positive […]

I’m about 70 pages into Joe Posnanski’s book The Soul of Baseball, which is about a year spent traveling and listening to Buck O’Neil, whose two great loves were jazz and baseball. “Buck always said the two greatest things in this world are baseball and jazz,” Posnanski wrote, and if Buck was wrong, it’s not […]

I don’t understand the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and with every year it makes less and less sense. At least the baseball Hall of Fame has standards. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has ambiguity. What is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s equivalent of 500 home runs or 300 wins? […]

A local public radio station has spent the last few week promoting a contest to determine the greatest year in music, a silly if fun exercise trying to measure that which is unmeasurable. Their on-air, and maybe off-, personalities have volleyed back and forth, like dueling jazz saxophonists trying to woo the audience, on whether […]

Steely Dan is in town tonight, which you’d know if you listened to the oldies station. If you’re a longtime fan, that should be as arresting as the first notes of Kid Charlemagne. Steely Dan, which once sang about the most unsavory of characters, is now promoted on the most normal of stations. It’s as […]